Don’t Get Unfollowed on Social Media

A vital part of your social media campaign should be obtaining and retaining followers. You want to make sure you’re not only getting the right followers, but also keeping the ones you have. BuzzStream and Fractl recently released findings from a survey of more than 900 people, to understand why people unfollow brands on social networks.

The report starts out with an interesting set of statistics: 50 percent of Facebook users follow only one to four brands on the social network, 26 percent follow five to nine, and only 22 percent follow 10 or more. With Facebook users being so selective as to what brands they follow, it’s important to keep the fans you do have.

Included in the report were reasons why people unfollowed brands on social media. Forty-five percent of respondents said the reason they unfollowed brands was too much self-promotion, 34 percent said it was because of automated messaging, 19 percent said poor use of hashtags, and one percent indicated other.

Read the full report here, as there are additional valuable findings. But the important takeaway for us is: you don’t want to get unfollowed on social media, so don’t post types of content users won’t like. Instead of promotional content, post content that offers value to your followers, that helps them in some way, or that they would enjoy.